What does China's 'perfect EV' look like? It must be smart, handy, and have stamina to go the distance
A war of words broke out between two of China's best-known technology entrepreneurs over social media on the eve of the 2023 Shanghai Auto Show, and became one of the defining topics of last week's marquee event in the world's largest vehicle market.
Claims of autonomous driving are all "nonsense" and "hokum", declared BYD's founder Wang Chuanfu on March 29 after his company delivered its best-ever quarterly profit on the back of overtaking Tesla as the planet's largest seller of vehicles that run either partially or fully on electric power.
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"It's ultimately a higher standard of assisted driving," Wang said, describing the electric vehicle (EV) industry's obsession with outdoing each other in self-driving as "the emperor's new clothes".
BYD's founder and chairman Wang Chuanfu is seen during a news conference in Hong Kong in March 2018. Photo: Bloomberg. alt=BYD's founder and chairman Wang Chuanfu is seen during a news conference in Hong Kong in March 2018. Photo: Bloomberg.>
Three weeks later, the man in charge of spearheading smart-driving technology at China's largest telecommunications supplier hit back.
"Either he does not understand this technology, or he said it deliberately" to knock the industry, retorted Huawei Technologies' rotating chairman Yu Chengdong, who also heads the telecoms vendor's smart car unit.
The bone of contention between the two - each a giant in his field - was more than mere grist for the social media mill, but gets to the crux of a debate in the fastest growing EV market, where 60 per cent of new vehicles entering China's roads are expected to be electric by 2030: what does the perfect EV look like?
Huawei Technologies' Richard Yu Chengdong, then the CEO of the telecoms equipment company, presents the new P20 smartphone in Paris in March 2018. Photo: AFP alt=Huawei Technologies' Richard Yu Chengdong, then the CEO of the telecoms equipment company, presents the new P20 smartphone in Paris in March 2018. Photo: AFP>
Increasingly, an EV's appeal is defined by how smart it is, not how far it can go or how cheap it is, as technological advances helped overcome drivers' so-called range anxiety and lower production costs.
"Young people in China no longer treat EVs as just vehicles, they want them to [function like] smartphones," said Cao Hua, a partner at the Shanghai private-equity firm Unity Asset Management, which counts artificial intelligence (AI) and vehicle robots among its investments.
"Making the cars autonomous and intelligent can draw more Chinese buyers."
Intelligence is measured by the vehicle's digital bells and whistles, manifested in such built-in features as voice-activated controls, facial recognition, over-the-air software upgrades, phone-linked features and self parking.
At the top of the bragging rights is autonomous driving - graded in five levels of sophistication - due to the technological complexities of ensuring that the vehicle can move about on its own at high speed without endangering the occupant.
All 10 of the models ranked "the smartest" among China's EVs could drive themselves with minimal human intervention in so-called conditional (Level 2 to Level 3) autonomous driving, according to a December 2022 survey by JD Power and Shanghai's Tongji University. Nine of the country's 10 bestselling EVs last year carried this feature.
The watershed moment came in 2022 when Chinese carmakers made headway to turn self driving into a reality, said UBS' analyst Paul Gong.
"Chinese companies are developing [self-driving] technology fast, while striving to produce and sell cars [fitted with these systems] on a large scale," he said.
"They have shown their capability in controlling costs, and it is an encouraging sign that they have taken the leap forward in commercialising the technology."
A self-driving tour bus at the Binhu National Forest Park in the Anhui provincial capital of Hefei in east China in October 2022. Photo: Xinhua alt=A self-driving tour bus at the Binhu National Forest Park in the Anhui provincial capital of Hefei in east China in October 2022. Photo: Xinhua>
The most complex component in self-driving is the light detection and range sensor (LiDAR), which uses pulsed lasers to map out a 3D view of the vehicle's surroundings.
This technology, widely adopted by Chinese EV assemblers, has turned Hesai Group into a billion-dollar company on the Nasdaq market two months after its initial public offering.
Tesla, whose chief executive Elon Musk was a LiDAR sceptic because of its installation cost, uses an array of cameras, global positioning system and radar in its EVs.
The carmaker's self-driving capabilities is under investigation by the US Justice Department after a Tesla owner sued the company for fraud and breach of contract, because its "Autopilot" system could not actually drive the vehicle without human intervention.
China's highway laws bar Level 5 full automation - requiring zero human intervention all the time - except on designated routes in controlled environments.
Most of the self-driving capabilities found in China's EVs are either classified as L2 or L3, where sensors are used to give a vehicle "environment detection" capability, enabling it to decide whether to pass a slow-moving car.
But the technology still requires human override and the driver must be alert and ready to take control.
"It will take some time before fully autonomous driving [passenger cars] can be commercialised," said Wang Xiaogang, co-founder and chief scientist with the AI firm SenseTime, a key supplier of autonomous driving technology in China.
"Eventually, driverless cars are supposed to be safer than cars with humans behind the wheels."
SenseTime provides a visual perception system to achieve autonomous driving. It also develops car analysis and behaviour detection technologies to ensure driving safety, such as facial recognition technology, which can tell whether the driver is drowsy.
It has already supplied autonomous driving systems to about 30 carmaking clients including Tesla challenger Nio and Geely's premium EV brand Zeekr in China.
Wang, also head of the company's smart car business division, said SenseTime had signed agreements with the assemblers to install a total of 31 million autonomous driving products in their cars.
China's congested roads, large population and long urban commutes have created a voluminous data file that helped to compress the learning curve for self-driving systems, getting them into the mainstream sooner than many other markets, analysts said.
Xpeng's G6 electric sports-utility vehicle at the Shanghai Auto Show on April 18. Photo: Bloomberg. alt=Xpeng's G6 electric sports-utility vehicle at the Shanghai Auto Show on April 18. Photo: Bloomberg.>
An example of that advantage was the navigation-guided pilot (X-NGP) installed in Xpeng's G6 mid-size sports-utility vehicle, capable of recognising traffic lights at intersections, changing lanes, overtaking other vehicles and executing left and right turns.
The carmaker, which tested the prototype of its X-NGP system in a partially automated 3,675-kilometre (2,284-mile) drive from Guangzhou to Beijing in 2021, rolled out the X-NGP last week, beating Tesla to the market. Tesla's full self-driving (FSD) software has yet to be approved for use in China.
The painstaking efforts by Xpeng's engineers would make the X-NGP "better suited" to the "complicated scenarios on China's roads [than FSD]", said the Guangzhou carmaker's president, Brian Gu.
Up to 15 per cent of all new EVs will have at least partial automation (L2) within the next three years, according to Baidu, China's dominant internet search engine operator, which created an open-source autonomous driving platform in 2017.
That translates to about 400 million smart cars that can drive on highways as well as city roads, and park themselves with partial or conditional human intervention.
Beijing-based Baidu is now running fully autonomous robot taxis on designated routes in the Hubei provincial capital of Wuhan, as well as Chongqing and Beijing.
Apollo Go, a self-driving robot taxi on a road in Wuhan, the capital of central Hubei province, on February 24. Photo: Reuters. alt=Apollo Go, a self-driving robot taxi on a road in Wuhan, the capital of central Hubei province, on February 24. Photo: Reuters.>
"In 2026, when intelligent cars become more prevalent, customers will be less likely to consider cars without intelligent driving capabilities," said Li Zhenyu, Baidu's vice-president and head of its Apollo intelligent driving business division.
"Carmakers are supposed to plan ahead to face a new round of competition."
Apollo's technology has been used in 134 models from 31 car brands - a total 7 million vehicles. The company is fully prepared for competition with FSD, said Apollo's general manager Rob Chu.
"It would take one year to 18 months for FSD to adapt to the traffic conditions in China," Chu said during an April 16 press conference in Shanghai.
"We still have time to fine-tune our technology and system to improve our capabilities in autonomous driving, and prepare them fully for competition."
Advancements in battery technology and China's investments in charging infrastructure have enabled EVs to travel farther than ever before on a single charge, removing the range anxiety that previously hampered adoption of the technology.
Six of the world's 10 largest EV battery makers are Chinese, giving the nation's carmakers a competitive advantage that extended the limits of how far an automobile can travel on a single charge.
Contemporary Amperex Technology Corporation (CATL), the largest of them all, last week unveiled a battery that packs a whopping 500 watt-hours per kilogram, double its current energy density, and enough to power a light aircraft someday.
Nio, one of the most aggressive start-ups nipping at Tesla's heels in China, put a 150 kWh battery pack in its ET7 electric car, with a stated range of 1,000-kilometres (620 miles) on a single charge in January 2021.
Most of the premium models launched since then, including Nio's EC6 and ES6, as well as Xpeng's P7 and G9, all can go beyond 500km on a single charge.
Still, China's vehicle owners are open to alternative new fuels, owing to the nation's headways in hydrogen fuel cells. Two-thirds of the 1,000 respondents in Deloitte's survey said they would give battery-powered cars a second thought if there were alternatives such as hydrogen fuel cells and e-fuels.
People visit at the Li Auto booth at the Auto Shanghai show on April 19. Photo: Reuters. alt=People visit at the Li Auto booth at the Auto Shanghai show on April 19. Photo: Reuters.>
The future was plain to see for the 1 million visitors who thronged the Shanghai Auto Show these past fortnight, where more than 100 carmakers launched about the same number of new models between them, 70 of which were battery-driven.
Chinese carmakers dominated the show, creating the greatest buzz and drawing the largest crowds with their concepts and new models. At BYD's exhibition space, the queue to get up close to the carmaker's crab-walking U8 SUV and U9 sports car was 30 minutes long.
The exhibition booths of marques from the US, Europe, Japan and South Korea, previously the dominant forces in China's automobile market, no longer held sway.
The combined first-quarter sales of Volkswagen's ventures in Changchun and Shanghai fell 15.4 per cent to 607,412 cars, putting the German carmaker within striking distance by BYD, whose deliveries jumped 77 per cent in the same period to 508,706 cars.
The writing is on the wall for Europe's carmakers, as they are falling behind Chinese rivals in digital technology, said Joerg Wuttke, the chief representative of the German chemicals company BASF and president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China.
"This auto show was an eye-opener for everyone, and we have to get up and keep going," Wuttke said in Shanghai this week.
This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2023 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
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